The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden's new comedy about English retirees in India, starts with an alluring mix of the exotic and the familiar: Dame Judi is on the phone in her London flat, speaking to a person in an Indian call centre who doesn't know how to accommodate the fact that her husband is dead. We chance upon Dame Maggie being marvellously racist in her wheelchair. The audience is encouraged to laugh at her absurdity, consider how times have changed, and settle into their seats.

Great Britain is not working for these people as their pension pots collapse and their children and partners disappear into the horizon. How will they find an answer? This is a beginning rich with anticipation and the potential for crossed wires, tension, redemption, the full works.

But then the cast goes to India, and amid the teeming multiplicity of the country, the same characters suddenly seem utterly self-involved. "India, like life itself, is what you put into it," says Dame Judi's character, with heart-crushing banality. The country becomes an orientalist backdrop for personal growth for each character, in the recent fashion of the Julia Roberts quasi-mystical vehicle Eat, Pray, Love.

Why should this matter, especially in a feel-good film of this nature? Director David Cronenberg once said that "all stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life". But in cinema, that most affecting of global exports, such an attitude can feel especially pernicious if it gets into the wrong hands. The problem with stereotypes is, of course, that they depend upon who is doing the gazing. They are not standard across the board. And the Indians we meet in this film conform to a peculiar genre – they are just so obliging, in their uncomplicated ways, that instead of giving us a tour round the promised "riot of colour and noise", the film presents a curiously old-fashioned, colonial form of cultural anaesthesia.

The hotel manager is a naive, Kipling-quoting simpleton, who is immensely grateful to Dame Judi and Dame Maggie for intervening so that his business and love life do not go down the pan due to his ineptitude. His girlfriend works in a call centre, but, again, needs help from Dame Judi on how to speak to British people on the phone – she is similarly very thankful for this service.

Even the Dalit serving woman who takes Dame Maggie back to her shanty town and is subjected to the full force of her bigotry, is excited to be in her presence again once they return to the hotel.

Most confusing of all, Tom Wilkinson's character goes in search of the love of his life – the servant boy with whom he had a disastrous love affair when he was a child himself. Fifty years on, and the boy is now married, but his wife just stands by helpfully, twitching her sari, while the men emote and reunite. It is bizarre to watch.

Why do none of these people tell these British visitors where to go? Why don't they display the prickly, disruptive, aggressive emotions that you'd expect to emerge at these sorts of interventions? What's with the continual compliance? To go back to Cronenberg, there is no truth for me in these stereotypes. But the infuriating thing is that apparently they represent a kind of truth for someone else. Or even worse, a kind of wish-fulfilment. The film begins by mocking the very desire for a nostalgic return to the days of the Raj that it then proceeds to emulate. Whom is this for?

A cursory look at the kind of material coming out of India of late reveals a country with a much more nuanced profile: Peepli Live, the dark comedy by writer-director Anusha Rizvi, shows impoverished farmers and their families contemplating suicide for cash. Beautiful Thing, by journalist Sonia Faleiro, documents the lives of table dancers in Mumbai with precision, empathy and awe.

Even These Foolish Things, the witty book on which this film is based, presents a much more feasible core idea: the retirement hotel is not a decrepit desert palace but a complex in Bangalore, India's silicon valley, and the people who conceive and run the place are 50-year-old men on a mission – an entrepreneur and doctor – rather than a buffoon with low IQ who needs foreign aid to save the day. It is difficult to understand the benefit of airbrushing these people out and replacing them with this vision of universal gratitude. The result is oddly depressing, a kind of lazy muzak for the soul.